Cognitive Psych Unit 4

Suppose that you have just learned that you will have a quiz in about 30 minutes on a set of fairly difficult short essays that you haven’t even glanced at. If you are like the students described in the discussion of regulating study strategies, you would

select the easiest essays to read first.

Elaine memorized the lakes of the Great Lakes by using the word HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). Elaine has used the

first-letter technique.

An instructor makes online practice quizzes available to her students in order to help them study for the midterm exam.  She allows the students to take each practice quiz more than once, but requires them to wait at least one day between attempts.  She is trying to help students by making use of the principle of

desirable difficulties.

You are studying for an exam in your Forensic Psychology class.  You know that 30% of the items will be fill-in-the-blank questions that require you to recall the term or name that best fits the description.  Which of the following study techniques would make use of the encoding specificity principle?

Quizzing yourself with flash cards (one side has a term or name and the other has the definition/description)

According to research on the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon,

you can typically provide a similar-sounding word, which matches the target word reasonably closely.

Researchers have conducted many studies about how students allocate their time, when studying for an exam. In general, these studies show that

without time pressure, students spend more time studying difficult material

The introductory discussion about creativity in Chapter 11 pointed out that

researchers do not agree on a universal definition of the term “creativity.”

In problem solving, the term obstacles refers to

restrictions that are encountered in problem solving.

According to the discussion of creativity,

creative solutions must be novel and useful.

Which of the following students’ summaries about metacognition and problem solving is the most accurate?

Saundra: “On insight problems, our confidence increases suddenly; on noninsight problems, our confidence builds up gradually.”

According to the research on visual images and problem solving,

visual images often allow problem solvers to select nontraditional solutions for problems.

According to the research on expertise and problem solving,

expert problem-solvers are more likely than novices to emphasize structural features in the representation of a problem.

The section on creativity in Chapter 11 examined research about intrinsic motivation and creativity in writing poetry. According to this research, people were especially likely to be creative

when they had high intrinsic motivation for working on the task.

You decide that a bearded professor wearing a rumpled sports coat is a member of the art faculty, rather than the business school faculty (which actually has more members) because he looks like an artist. What judgment error have you committed?

 

You did not pay enough attention to the base rate.

Jeff is concerned that the framing effect may be influencing his decision to study abroad next semester. According to Chapter 12, an effective way to correct for the framing effect is to

consider how he would feel about not studying abroad next semester.

An important difference between reasoning and decision making is that

reasoning tasks are more like to use established rules to reach a conclusion

Here is a reasoning problem: “Some vegetables have seeds. Some things that have seeds are fruits. Therefore, some vegetables are fruits.” What kind of reasoning does this represent?

A syllogism

According to the research on the reasons for overconfidence,

people often have trouble recalling the alternate hypotheses.

An important difference between reasoning and decision making is that in reasoning,

We have well-established rules for arriving at conclusions

On the classic selection task in conditional reasoning, people work on the problem, “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.” Research on variations of this task indicates that

the problem is easier to solve if it describes something concrete, such as drinking age

Which of the following definitions for the term “foresight bias” is most accurate?

Foresight bias occurs when people are too confident that they will do well in a future exam, based on the estimates they make while studying the material.

In Chapter 6 we discussed college students’ metamemory about factors affecting memory accuracy. According to this discussion,

students usually believe that simple rehearsal is an effective way to study for an exam.

As you read this question, you may be asking yourself whether you understand it. If so, you are engaging in

metacomprehension.

What can we conclude about college students’ accuracy on measures of metacomprehension?

Students are only slightly more confident about the items they answered correctly than the items they answered incorrectly.

You have enrolled in Professor Lawrence’s Sociology class this semester, and a friend (who took the same professor last year) warns you that Professor Lawrence tends to speak rapidly and present a great deal of information in a short time.  You decide to be sure that you have read the assigned textbook chapter before each class meeting to familiarize yourself with the concepts before the lecture begins.  Your strategy is based on the idea of

minimizing the cognitive load on your working memory.

Which of the following students provides the most accurate information about expertise during problem solving?

Jack: “Experts are more likely to use their top-down processing effectively.”

Steve is a college sophomore who is fascinated by politics, even though he isn’t currently enrolled in any related courses. He spends several hours each day reading a variety of political columns, visiting his favorite news websites, and talking about political issues. Researchers would say that Steve is high in

intrinsic motivation.

Divergent production

involves making a number of different responses to a variety of test items

Why is the embodied cognition approach important when people are trying to solve certain kinds of problems?

Your gestures often encourage you to express abstract thoughts and terms.

According to the research on mental sets,

people may produce inferior problem solutions if they are shown examples of possible solutions before they try to solve the problem.

Suppose that you believe you can increase your cognitive performance by challenging yourself to work harder and more effectively. According to your textbook, you would have

a growth mindset.

Suppose that you learned to make peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches by spreading peanut butter on one piece of bread, jelly on the other, and then placing the two pieces together. You are now making sandwiches for a crowd, and you use this same strategy. However, it would be more efficient to first spread peanut butter on half the pieces, and then spread jelly on the other half. Your inefficient problem solving illustrates the concept called

mental set.

A family has three children, all of whom are boys. Everyone predicts that their next child will be a girl. Which heuristic does this demonstrate?

Representativeness

Which of the following students’ statements best summarizes the research on the belief-bias effect?

Petra: “The belief-basis effect shows us how top-down processing influences logical reasoning; we should emphasize the actual information in the reasoning problem.”

A likely explanation for the illusory correlation effect is that

we pay too much attention to just one cell in the matrix, rather than the three other possible combinations of variables.

The research on the framing effect suggests that

we are influenced by the wording of a question and the background information.

Researchers such as Gerd Gigerenzer argue that people create a wide variety of heuristics that generally help them make adaptive decisions in the real world—a point of view referred to as

ecological rationality

Which of the following students has the best explanation for illusory correlations?

Tim: “Illusory correlations arise when people focus their attention on only one set of characteristics, and they do not consider the other sets of characteristics.”

According to the discussion of metacomprehension,

metacomprehension can be improved when students receive feedback about their understanding before they take a test.

Why should you pay attention to metamemory if you want to improve your memory?

Metamemory can help you decide which strategies work best for you.

In which of the following conditions is your metamemory accuracy likely to be the highest?

When you wait several minutes before judging whether you’ll remember the material

The computer stimulation called General Problem Solver

solves problems using means-ends analysis

Which of the following students provides the most accurate basic information about problem solving?

Tiffany: “In problem solving, you need to reach a goal, but the solution is not an obvious one.”

What is the difference between functional fixedness and mental set?

Functional fixedness emphasizes the objects involved in solving the problem, whereas mental set emphasizes the problem solver’s strategies.

Functional fixedness emphasizes the objects involved in solving the problem, whereas mental set emphasizes the problem solver’s strategies.

Understanding

You would expect a matrix to be a useful problem solving representation when

the information is stable, not changing over time.

One way that functional fixedness and mental set are similar to each other is that

Both show that we rely too heavily on a strategy that is typically useful.

In computer simulation, the computer is programmed

to perform a task the same way that a human would

Suppose that you are assigning eight college students to two committees. By chance, one committee has four students from the social sciences, and the other has four students from the humanities. If people protest that this arrangement does not seem to be random, they are following

the representativeness heuristic

A friend tells you that drama majors tend to be extremely disorganized. However, when you actually make a tally of 10 friends who are drama majors and 20 friends who are not, you find no relationship. Your friend’s error was most likely to be an example of

an illusory correlation.

Research on the belief-bias effect shows that

familiar statements often lead people to use “common sense” rather than logical reasoning

According to the research on the confirmation bias,

people would rather confirm a hypothesis than disprove it.

A physician is trying to convince a man that he must give up smoking. The man initially believes that the probability of lung cancer is increased by only 10% if he smokes. Why are decision-making heuristics relevant to this situation?

The man’s estimate will be influenced by a low anchor.

A professor knows that if it is raining outside, the window of her office will be wet. She looks at her window and notices that it is wet. She, therefore, concludes that it must be raining outside. Which kind of reasoning is she using?

Affirming the consequent

How could the illusory correlation effect produce a stereotype?

people pay too much attention to a group of people who have a particular combination of characteristics, and they ignore the other three possible combinations of characteristics

Your textbook discussed a metamemory study that asked students to estimate their total score on a test that they had just taken. The comparison between the students’ actual score and their estimated score showed that

The students with the highest actual scores provided the most accurate estimated scores.

Which of the following students provides the best definition of the term mnemonics?

Cynthia: “Mnemonics refers to using a strategy to improve our memory.”

Amelia speaks French and English fluently. Connor speaks only English. According to research,

Amelia should experience the tip-of-the-tongue effect more frequently than Connor.

Suppose that you study for your next examination in this course by reviewing each topic and asking how the information might be relevant to the career you want to pursue. Your study technique makes use of

the self-reference principle.

Roediger and Karpicke’s 2006 study of the testing effect indicated that taking memory tests improves retention as compared to extra studying

even when students receive no feedback on the accuracy of their results

Suppose that people are working on an ongoing task. They are most likely to forget to complete a prospective-memory task if

they are performing the ongoing task automatically.

according to our discussions on problem solving,

people typically use problem-solving strategies that can produce a solution fairly quickly

In order to understand a problem, you need to understand the underlying meaning. This basic core of a problem is called its

structural features.

In functional fixedness,

we assign a particular use to an object, and that use tends to remain stable.

Suppose that several high school algebra teachers are trying to encourage their students to use analogies more appropriately when they try to solve word problems. The teachers should instruct students

to sort a number of problems into categories, based on structural similarities

Suppose that you belong to an organization in which an average of only 8 out of 12 people attend meetings on a regular basis. Which of the following ideas best illustrates the way of overcoming a mental set when solving this problem of low attendance?

Encourage everyone to try to figure out a new way to solve the problem, avoiding the solutions that the group members had previously tried.

People are especially likely to use analogies effectively in problem solving

when they have been trained to pay attention to structural similarities.

Imagine that a group of male college students is about to take a test of their ability to “read” other people’s body language. The students are divided into three groups. Group A is not told anything about how males and females tend to perform on this test. Group B is told that males tend to outperform females on this test. Group C is told that females tend to outperform males on this test. Based on research regarding stereotype threat, we would expect that

Group B will perform best, followed by Group A and then Group C.

Dr. Anna Smith is a clinical psychologist. She just heard about someone who had a bad reaction to a medication. She knows that this medication has worked well with many of her clients who have experienced depression during the last few months. With respect to decision-making heuristics, she should be concerned that her future decisions about this medication might be influenced by

the tendency for recency to influence availability

Research on the conjunction fallacy shows that

people sometimes believe that the probability of a combination of two attributes is statistically more likely than the probability of one of those attributes.

How could the illusory correlation effect produce a stereotype?

people pay too much attention to a group of people who have a particular combination of characteristics, and they ignore the other three possible combinations of characteristics

When people commit the base-rate fallacy, they often

pay too little attention to information about relative frequency.

when people estimate confidence intervals, they typically

provide estimates that are too narrow

Because of a recently passed law, in Oregon, everyone who gets a driver’s license or state identification card is automatically registered to vote; they must choose to “opt out” if they do not wish to be registered. In most states, a person must take steps to register to vote. In the future, if voting statistics show that significantly more Oregonians than other U.S. citizens are registered to vote, we might say that this is a good example of the _______ heuristic in action.

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Research on divided attention suggests that

distractions such as email and Facebook prevent students from remembering a lecture as effectively as they might remember without distraction.

According to research on the testing effect,

 

one explanation is that test-taking creates desirable difficulties.

How is the tip-of-the-tongue experience relevant to metacognition?

when people report a tip of the tongue state, they accurately assess that they are close to identifying the missing word

Which of the following students provides the best definition of the term “ecological validity”?

Tessa: “Ecological validity means that there is a high similarity between the situation where the study is being conducted, and the situation in “real life” where the results will be applied.”

Heather and Tom want to bake some blueberry muffins, but they do not have a muffin tin. So Heather takes some soda cans out of the recycling bin, Tom cuts the top 2 inches off of each can, and they use the bottoms of the cans to bake their muffins. Tom and Heather have demonstrated

overcoming functional fixedness.

Which of the following examples about intrinsic motivation is correct?

You are working hard on a task because you think it is interesting.

According to our discussions on problem solving,

people typically use strategies that are designed to produce a quick solution.

according to the discussion of problem-solving and expertise in chapter 11,

in some fields, expertise is not strongly correlated with the number of years of experience

which of the following students provides the best summary of the situated-cognition approach?

Vladimir: “psychologists who study problem-solving should emphasize how people can solve everyday problems in the real world, rather than in an artificial setting.”

Which of the following research topics would be most interesting to a psychologist who favors the situated-cognitive approach?

What kind of strategies do college students use when trying to solve the problem of getting a ride to their hometown for a vacation?

According to the research on visual images and problem solving,

visual images often allow problem solvers to select nontraditional solutions for problems.

Cynthia has developed an informal hypothesis: “If a student is a psychology major, then that student favors gun control.” She questions 20 psychology majors and all 20 do favor gun control. However, she does not pursue additional information. Specifically, she does not seek out people who oppose gun control to determine whether they are psychology majors. From the perspective of deductive reasoning, Cynthia has

demonstrated confirmation bias.

An important difference between reasoning and decision making is that in reasoning,

we have well-established rules for arriving at conclusions.

Suppose that Oksana is driving in a car to a friend’s house. As she pulls into the friend’s driveway, she sees that the odometer shows the number 2222.2 miles. She says to herself, “This number is weird…something really unusual is going to happen today when I am with my friend.” This reaction would be an example of

the representativeness heuristic

Which of the following kinds of propositional reasoning is actually valid?

Affirming the antecedent

Heuristics are relevant when we try to answer a reasoning problem because

we often answer a reasoning problem by using a heuristic that a conclusion is a “good bet,” even if it is not always true.

Part of Chapter 6 examined students’ study strategies for easy and difficult material. Which of the following students provides the most accurate perspective on that research?

Sondra: “When the memory task is relatively easy, students spend the most time on the difficult items; when the memory task is relatively difficult, students spend the most time on the easy items.”

According to the discussion of the narrative technique,

the research suggests that this technique works well as long as you can create the story easily and also recall it easily.

According to the discussion of metacomprehension,

metacomprehension can be improved when students receive feedback about their understanding before they take a test.

According to the research on the keyword method, this technique

is often helpful for learning people’s names.

The tip-of-the-tongue experience is related to metacognition because

people think about whether they are likely to remember the target word, and this estimate is one kind of metacognitive task.

According to your textbook, cognition is the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge. Compared to more basic cognitive processes such as working memory, problem solving makes more use of which of those four processes?

Transformation of knowledge

Working memory is important when people are trying to solve an algebra “word problem” because

you need to keep the important parts of the problem in your mind while working on the problem.

When people try to solve problems, which feature of the problem should they emphasize the most?

Structural features

Suppose that you see a male student on your campus who is wearing a suit and a tie. You conclude, “He must be a business major; he couldn’t be a psychology major.” However, your college has twice as many psychology majors as business majors. Your decision is apparently guided by

the representativeness heuristic.

The research on logical reasoning shows that the confirmation bias is especially likely to operate when the participants

are working on a task that focuses on arbitrary stimuli, rather than on human interactions